[Rd] apropos changes in r-devel: intended feature or bug?

[Gabor Grothendieck]

I have not been followin this thread but if apropos is changed note that
the
   Help | Apropos
menu item in Windows may to be changed depending on what the
change is.

On 12/22/06, Martin Maechler <maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch> wrote:
> Ok, so be it:
>
> We have seen that both apropos() and find()
> have used `some' non-standard evaluation up to R 2.4.1
> which gave quite incosistent behavior.
>
> Getting rid of non-standard evaluation get's rid of all
> inconsistencies but of course is not back-compatible either.
>
> I'll do this.
> Martin
>
>
> >>>>> "Luke" == Luke Tierney <luke at stat.uiowa.edu>
> >>>>>     on Fri, 22 Dec 2006 07:08:44 -0600 (CST) writes:
>
>    Luke> On Fri, 22 Dec 2006, Kurt Hornik wrote:
>    >>>>>>> Martin Maechler writes:
>    >>
>    >>>>>>> "DeepS" == Deepayan Sarkar <deepayan.sarkar at gmail.com>
>    >>>>>>> on Thu, 21 Dec 2006 22:07:27 -0800 writes:
>    >>
>    DeepS> The old apropos started with: if
>    DeepS> (!is.character(what)) what <-
>    DeepS> as.character(substitute(what))
>    >>
>    DeepS> The new one has:
>    >>
>    DeepS> if (character.only) stopifnot(is.character(what))
>    DeepS> else what <- as.character(substitute(what))
>    >>
>    DeepS> i.e., the check for is.character(what) is
>    DeepS> missing. This has the effect that 'what' can no
>    DeepS> longer be a character string generated by a function
>    DeepS> call unless 'character.only = TRUE'. I don't think
>    DeepS> this was intended; the change makes previously valid
>    DeepS> use invalid and I can't think of a situation where it
>    DeepS> is useful.
>    >>
>    >>> [ Did you read the corresponding NEWS entry? ]
>    >>
>    >>> It now parallelizes the use in library() , require() etc,
>    >>> and in particular does what the documentation says it does!
>    >>
>    >>> The old behavior was much less consistent and not according to
>    >>> documentation:
>    >>
>    >>> apropos(lm)    was equivalent to apropos("lm")
>    >>> but  apropos(fit)   gave an error.
>    >>
>    >> I would actually prefer if we only had standard evaluation for apropos()
>    >> and find().
>    >>
>    >> (I understand we cannot do this for library() and help().)
>
>    Luke> I agree completely.  If it is OK to make changes that make previous
>    Luke> usage fail then it would be better to go to standard evaluation and
>    Luke> let apropos(lm) fail.
>
>    Luke> luke
>
>    Luke> --
>    Luke> Luke Tierney
>    Luke> Chair, Statistics and Actuarial Science
>    Luke> Ralph E. Wareham Professor of Mathematical Sciences
>    Luke> University of Iowa                  Phone:             319-335-3386
>    Luke> Department of Statistics and        Fax:               319-335-3017
>    Luke> Actuarial Science
>    Luke> 241 Schaeffer Hall                  email:      luke at stat.uiowa.edu
>    Luke> Iowa City, IA 52242                 WWW:  http://www.stat.uiowa.edu
>
>    Luke> ______________________________________________
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>
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